Various graphics software applications may be utilized by different digital/electronic systems to render graphical scenes. In some cases, multiple graphics software applications may run in the same execution environment or system. In a multi-application execution environment such as a multi-application framework (MAF) environment, multiple native application user interfaces (UIs) may need to be composed to create a designated user experience. In MAF full screen mode a particular application may be selected and brought to the foreground while remaining applications except the UI framework render to off-screen surfaces and these surfaces are redirected to the UI framework for final output.
However, compared with an application rendering natively directly to screen, such full screen mode processing may consume more hardware (HW) resources than desirable for cross process rendering and UI compositing purposes. For instance, a graphics core, such as an embedded Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), may generally support only one execution thread. To support multiple applications, a typical GPU may time slice between rendering applications regardless of whether those applications are rendering on screen or off screen. As a result, in a conventional MAF environment, even if only one of multiple rendering applications is rendering on screen, that application benefits from only a fraction of the GPU's rendering capacity. To better effect on screen rendering, a typical MAF environment may shut down all other rendering processes to permit an on screen rendering process sole access to GPU resources.